During his almost five decades of practice, Henning Larsen has had the chance to design a wide range of buildings, ranging from newspaper offices to churches, housing to embassies, colleges to museums, and factories to theaters. Although his work is occasionally marred by a misfit in scale, Larsen carries on the excellent traditions of Danish architecture: elegant detailing, beautiful use of materials, and massing of geometric forms. Larsen's work is inventive and deliberate. The body of work has changed over time as themes and references shifted, and several major periods can be established within his oeuvre, roughly as represented by work between 1960-79, 1980-89, and 1990 to the present.

Larsen was born in Brejning, in Jutland, Denmark, in 1925, and studied at the Technical College in Copenhagen before entering the Kunstakademie in 1949. He spent a year of his professional studies at the Architectural Association in London. A graduation scholarship allowed him to take courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tour the United States, and work for a Milwaukee firm. After returning to Copenhagen, he opened his own drawing office and worked briefly for the State Building Research Institute.

In the late 1950s Larsen collaborated with three contemporaries: Gehrdt Bornebusch, Max Bruel, and Jorgen Selchau. The foursome entered and placed in several competitions and produced the austere Crematorium Chapel (1960) in Glostrup, an essay in brick and light similar to Sigurd Lewerentz's St. Mark's Church (1960). Henceforth, Larsen worked on his own; one of his first works to be built was another funeral chapel, this time in Aarhus (1967).

In the 1960s Larsen was a guest professor at Yale and Princeton universities, where he would have encountered American architects Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, and Michael Graves. Quite likely, it was there he gained exposure to and developed an interest in literary theory, which he has since claimed as a preoccupation. Architecturally, this took the form of structuralist designs that dealt with issues of flexibility, growth, and legibility of form. The clearest examples of Larsen's structuralist thinking are two school projects: Hoje 'Tastrup Grammar School (Denmark, 1981) and Trondheim University (1978). In 1970 Larsen won the Nordic competition for the design of Trondheim University in Norway, but only a portion of this megascaled campus plan was realized. One of his finest works, it explores the use of industrialized building elements (prefabricated concrete, steel, and glass) and accommodates growth by extending its gridded modules and glazed street. Resemblances to Vittorio Gregotti's University of Calabria design (1974) of the same period are manifest.

In the 1980s a more whimsical side of Larsen's work emerged, comparable to the historicist Postmodern work of Venturi, Graves, and British architect James Stirling. His designs from this period, such as the Nation Center in Nairobi, Africa (1993), and Dalgas Have housing Frederiksberg, Denmark (1991), are characterized by figural and ornamental experimentation. They are frequently charming and possess a storybook quality akin to Aldo Rossi's work but without the melancholic side. Larsen realized one of his most important works in the immense Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1984) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which fuses a Danish sensibility with a deferential interpretation of Islamic culture.

In the 1990s Larsen returned to an emphasis on the tectonic expressiveness of material and form. As a result, recent work has been some of his most vital and includes the addition to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (1996) in Copenhagen, the Enghoj Church (Nordby, 1994), and the BT Building (Copenhagen, 1994).

Spatial themes unify Larsen's diverse oeuvre, which includes the use of elemental forms such as the cone and cylinder, as the rotunda and hinge, the monolithic treatment of the exterior, siting on a plinth, and organization along a glazed interior street. By utilizing daylight, Larsen at times initiates a processional sequence through the building: an ascent toward the light.

The tone of Larsen's buildings is usually monumental, harkening back to ancient and Enlightenment sources (such as 18th-century architects Charles Nicholas Ledoux and Etienne-Louis Boullée). The expression of weight is manifested through battered walls and exaggerated cornices, and is a theme found in Scandinavian Doricist architecture, which is an evident reference for Larsen. For example, he reinterprets the spatial and decorative ideas (drum and block) of Erik Gunnar Asplund's Stockholm Library (1927) in his Malmé Library (1997) in Sweden.

On a similar note, Larsen's Gentofte Library (1985) refers to Alvar Aalto's library at Viipuri. In both cases, a mezzanine wraps around an atrium that contains book stacks. Larsen repeats this arrangement in smaller scale to make an exhibition space. The ubiquitous half vault and circular skylights, as well as the reading room tables and chairs designed by Aalto, reflect the Finnish architect's influence on Larsen. The Gentofte exterior makes use of traditional Danish construction techniques that Aalto appropriated as his own: brick walls rendered with a thin layer of white stucco.

Larsen's buildings are usually white, with occasional splashes of blue for interest. Much like the rendered walls, material texture and geometric pattern are part of his decorative palette. The buildings manage to connect to the primitive traditions inhabiting the Nordic landscape and suggest new possibilities.

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.